I am sure you have turned on an untuned radio set, turned the dial, and picked up all kinds of background sounds - hissing and whirring and whining. These days TV is on round the clock but in the old days it would go off at midnight as a rule leaving a screen of white dots and a mushy sound. A test card showing different colours to aid tuning used to appear during the daytime before TV came on, sometimes as late as 6 p.m. You've all heard of space débris, the discarded stages of rockets and dead satellites that haven't already crashed to the ground or ocean, and you all know what rubbish tips look (and perhaps smell) like, but have you any idea how much JUNK is flying about in your mind, and how many turbulent and meaningless FEELINGS are colliding in your lev (heart)? Well, of course you do, and if you're honest about it, and are prepared to have a hard look at it, then you will soon be appalled at what's actually in there. The brain is just full of nonsense, acting a bit like a fly trap for thoughts and sounds that just orbit the conscious mind and occasionally collide with your conscious mind. "Where did that come from?" you ask yourself in surprise. If it's not someone or something else's voice intruiding then it's your own mental débris.

This is the subject Yahweh has clearly led me to talk to you about today. I was kept up a good part of two night's ago wrestling over it and early yesterday morning He showed me a vision. One of the reasons we are so ineffective, and one of the reasons we get so confused, I believe, is because there is no order or discipline of the mind. It's like a burned out library full of fragments of old books we never read or never really read seriously.

Part of the problem is we fill our mind with so much rubbish listening passively to junk music, watching junk movies passively and accepting uncritically what others tell us. And we are bombarded with sounds and images every time we go to a shopping mall and go into stops with advertising screens. All of this gets recorded by our brains. We cram our beings with so much rubbish that we suffer from daily mental indigestion. Where do you think all of that stuff goes? It doesn't, as you might wish, go in one ear and right out the other. You have to make a decision as to what you're going to do with it - filter it out before it starts bouncing around inside, process it in some meaningful way, or have some sort of mental paper bin at hand. For sound and visual input, like the feelings they trigger, are a kind of food, some of it nutritious for the soul but by far too much of it is junk and of no nutritional value at all. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is little more than detrius. And in case you haven't done your research properly, junk food makes the body sick just as junk sound and junk images make the psyche sick.

We are extremely sensitive, intricate and complex biological, psychic and spiritual entities (I nearly said 'machines' but that's far too impersonal). Part of the reason things go wrong for us in this processing (or lack of processing) is that we fail to take responsibility for what we 'eat' psychically and spiritually. We have become as careless with our minds and hearts as we have with our bodies and diets. And remember, what you don't process and throw out stays behind to pollute your soul.

I suffer from this problem myself and I am constantly sifting through junk in my sleep and in my meditations. I have quite a sensitive psychic radar so I pick all kinds of things up. Thoughts also pop into my head from my sub-conscious, much of it from that vast store of accumulated junk, and I have to decide whether I want to keep it there any longer or not. So I have to make decisions concerning what those thoughts represent - ideas, feelings, doctrines, dispositions - by rejecting them outright in Yah'shua's (Jesus') Name if they are inconsistent with His Torah (Law/Teaching) or simply giving them to Him if I am not sure, for further clarification, by asking Him to shine the light of emet (truth) on it.

You may think that the thoughts and feelings you accept are inconsequential but they all go to define who you are - your character, your personality - if you believe them and integrate them. For if you believe them, they leaven your whole being and redefine you. You are the sum product of your thoughts, feelings, decisions and deeds. You are like a conglomerate of TV stations.

The Vision

Yesterday morning, around 6 a.m., Yahweh showed me a vision. I saw a pile of neatly compressed junk in blocks that were stacked on top of one another the size of a very large wall, a bit like compressed cars in a metal scrap yard. Standing in front of this wall of junk was a large stag (male deer), head high with a beautiful set of antlers.

The Interpretation

I have never seen a stag in vision before so this was a new symbol for me to process. I knew that all the junk behind the stag was thoughts I had processed and rejected and compressed ready for disposal...which if course is done by Yah'shua (Jesus) through His cleansing blood. Therefore I released all of it to Him.

Much of this we do unconsciously but only become aware of it in our dreams. Our dreams are a window to what is happening in that other 'part' of ourselves and is just as important as our conscious mind - it's still a part of self but unfortunately often represents those aspects of our consciousness that we don't want to deal with and so bury away. The great conflicts we experience in our night dreams are showing us the disharmony between the aware and unconscious parts of our being which we can never really hide save with demonic help - they know how to rewire your brain to create mental bottlenecks...to their advantage, of course, and never yours.

Like it or not, Yah'shua (Jesus) wants both parts - conscious and unconscious - so that He can heal both and bring both together into echad or oneness. He wants us to be single-minded, fully awake, integrated, and conscious while we are sleeping, so that we are not tossed to and fro and having no apparent control in our dreams. The stag in my vision represents this echad (oneness) and controlling principle. Yahweh doesn't want us to be double-minded because double-mindedness means instability and internal civil war, hardly a representation of the integrative shalom that Him being in us is supposed to bring. The trials and tribulations we are permitted to experience are in part to force us to look at the contradictory parts of ourselves so that we can reconcile them and make a decision to be one or the other - we are not granted the luxury of having multiple opinions for reasons that should be obvious:

"My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your emunmah (faith) produces savlanut (patience). But let savlanut (patience) have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of Elohim (God), who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him. But let him ask in emunah (faith), with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from Yahweh; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways" (Jas.1:2-8. NKJV).

Where there are contrary opinions within, we are to ask Yahweh for wisdom, trusting Him to show us which is the right one (or neither, if there is another perception we have not had), so that we make a choice based on believing that He knows best. We do, however, have to absolutely trust His revelation else we risk making a wrong choice leading to further confusion when these false beliefs come into conflict with the emet (truth) that we encounter through our interaction with people and with life in general.

Why the stag? We all know about the female deer which principally symbolises grace, harmony, compassion, gentleness, meekness, peace, fleetness, and natural beauty. It is a nervous and elusive animal, fleeing at the slightest sign of danger. It is traditionally associated with the unconscious mind.

But the stag, though similar, represents the male side of this. As an animal it does not fight unless provoked but when it does it is tenacious. The stag is symbolic of maturity and toqef (authority) and is associated with independence, purification, dignity, alertness and virility. It is not for nothing that it is known as the 'King of the Forest', and the protector of its creatures, much as the lion is known as the 'King of the Jungle'.

The symbolic stag stood in front of this pile of compressed and ready-to-be-disposed-of garbage because it had been responsible for accumulating this junk and processing it for disposal. Getting order into the mind requires both the maturity that comes from discernment and motivation through trial and tribulation. The ability to thus sort and organise in an orderly way is a function of the gift of toqef or authority given to male, directing principle. It's purpose is overcoming all that is opposed to Yahweh-Elohim. The large antlers are not only symbolically the stag's glory but its weapons of spiritual warfare against the chaos and disorder that results from sin. Every soul must at some point make the serious decision to get their minds in order and to wage war against chaos. It does not happen by itself but requires constant application and effort under the sovereign direction of Yah'shua (Jesus). It must constantly make declarations of intent and exercise will in Messiah and not relent until it has overcome, the dominant theme of the Book of Revelation. If it does nothing, chaos will simply increase and shalom (peace) diminish until it is lost altogether. Satan's Kingdom is built on chaos and artificial order in the midst of that chaos.

It never seems to occur to people that the more junk we house in our heads and hearts the harder it becoems for us to hear the voice of Yahweh speaking to us. And we absolutely need His revelation if our lives are to be governed effectively and successfully. The junk in our minds acts like filters to the Davar (Word) that Yahweh speaks to us, making it very hard for us to discern whether it is actually Yahweh speaking, or ourselves or some mischievous spirit trying to waylay us. It's because of this mental junk that we hear Yahweh's voice in so many strange ways.

To give you an example, the other day I heard Yahweh speaking to me with an American accent. This is only odd because I am not Amercian and tend to naturally think with a British accent, though sometimes I think in Norwegian and occasionally other languages. But that particular night I had been watching an American movie before I went to sleep and it had left a layer of impressions in my sub-conscience through which the revelation of Yahweh had to pass. Accordingly I heard Him with an American accent. Sometimes He has spoken to me in Norwegian because a part of me, as I said, thinks in that language. But the more junk thoughts clog up our mind, the more impervious to hearing Yahweh's Davar (Word) we become. And those who have wandered away from Him almost never hear Him anymore. And they won't unelss they make a real effort to repent or if, through grace, He sudddenly breaks through as He did to Paul when he was in the apogee (greatest distance) of his personal relationship with Elohim (God).

We have to discipline our minds to think in the way Yahweh thinks and to feel in the way that He feels, and the only way to do that is to aim and achieve a synergy resulting from a combination of lots of Scripture study and prayer. We need to think the biblical way, becoming trained to operate in its tavnith or pattern until it becomes second nature to us. The more we do this the more tuned to Him we become. We then start operating on the wavelength of the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit).

It's been interesting also to experience over the years how particular Bible versions act as filters too because of the imprint of the translators - with their biases - on the mind. My earliest experiences were very much with the King James Version. Today I use many versions so that I can sense the intent behind the words and so more connect to the lev or heart of Yahweh's Being. He speaks to both mind andlev (heart) requiring that we get both of these in synchrony too. Accurate Bible translations then become important so that we are thinking like Yahweh and not like the biased translators we read.

The more we are conformed to the likeness of Messiah the clearer we will hear our Father speaking to us. This requires increasing surrender to Him so that we have His mind:

"For 'who has known the mind of Yahweh that he may instruct Him?' But we have the mind of Messiah (Christ)" (1 Cor.2:16, NKJV).

That should be our goal. However, we do not always hear Yahweh in words - sometimes it is just a worldless 'knowing' that is communicated to us even before it is processed into language. I must admit that I am more trained in the gift of seership so that I see visions or pictures with comparitive ease but of late I have been hearing more and more of His actual devarim (words) as more junk gets cleared out. And then surrounding all of this is the overall sense of shalom (peace) that tells me on the bigger scale I am on the right path. That's most important - that awareness that we are in His arms, in His presence, safe and secure.

May I please urgently counsel you young people in particular not to throw away the oppportunity to discipline your minds and hearts while you are in your youth so that you can get into the habit of hearing (and seeing) Yahweh early? Don't waste half your life being in the dark and struggling to hear Him because of all the mental clutter you fill fill your heads with from TV and computers? Don't let your head become a urinal for the world - keep it clean and tidy. Like housework, you have to do it all your life. Mental hygiene is a part of godliness - having that clarity of thought, uncumbered with junk, it really a beautiful experience too. A confused and befuddled mind brings no joy at all both because you have no idea what's going on inside yourself and because you can't communicate with others, spoiling relationships. So start filtering out the junk like a good radio receiver.

So what practical steps can I take? Start simple. Emet (truth) is like a pyramid - build your mind upon it:

The 10 Commandments are amplified & clarified by all the other Commandments

Build up your mind and your lev (heart) with these and cement them in deeds of ahavah (love), faithfulness, and loyalty to El Elyon (the Most High) through Yah'shua the Messiah (Jesus Christ). The stronger the broader you build this Pyramid of Emet the less space there will be for junk and everything else that is good and truthful, whether it be science, philosophy, art, or whatever, will simply fit in naturally. Feed the carnal mind (flesh) and it grows strong and soon fills with junk. Starve it by feeding the spiritual mind with the emet (truth) of Yahweh's Davar (Word) and the junk will simply be pushed out - it just won't fit, the Scriptures acting as mental antibodies attacking and destroying all that is false.

Become a stag, a guardian of your own mind, gentle but strong, sensitive but tenacious, and guard Yahweh's mitzvot (commandments) with all your lev (heart) because they are His Lev (Heart). Amen

Comments from readers

" While reading this, I was reminded how the Beloved or Bridegroom in the Song of Solomon is described as a stag:

“The voice of my beloved! Behold, he comes leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag. Behold, he stands behind our wall; he is looking through the windows, gazing through the lattice.” (Song of Solomon 2:8-9)

“Make haste, my beloved, and be like a gazelle rr a young stag on the mountains of spices.” (Song of Solomon 8:14)

With where the Song of Solomon on one level reflects Yah’shua as Bridegroom with the Bride, I think the image of the stag in the vision can also be understood to represent Yah’shua. Except for where some of His own grace and majesty is expressed (and also as you mentioned, of His “toqef (authority) … purification, dignity, independence, alertness and virility”, and also, the horns of His ability as Warrior to fight and defend), it would also seem to fit within the context of your vision, of where Yah’shua is present (and needed) in the process of junk or unclean thoughts and feelings being purposefully ‘processed’ or ‘taken captive’ and discarded :)

With this I’m reminded of 2 Corinthians 10:4-6:

“For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in Elohim for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of Elohim, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, and being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled.”